The 1st year students of the Ballyfermot College of Further Education radio course have launched their FM station for 2015, “Icon Radio”, which will broadcast from the South Dublin campus all next week.
There are 30 students working on the station which goes on air on the morning of Monday April 20th at 10am and finishes up at 5pm on Friday the 24th.
The station is the culmination of many weeks of work of the students of the National Diploma course run by the well-known media college which has, in the past, produced a huge number of Irish radio stars including Damien O’Meara and Rick O’Shea of RTÉ Radio, Chris Murray of LMFM, Dan Pitcher of FM104 and many others.
RadioToday were at the college for the launch yesterday. Station manager Emma Currivan told us that she’s really looking forward to hitting the airwaves next week, adding: “The frequency is 107.8 and we will also be online on our soon-to-be-launched web site iconradio.ie. Because Icon Radio is run by students we each have been allocated different departments, production team, programming team, marking, promotions and social media team and the finance, web and sponsorship team”.
The extremely organised students were raising funds at the launch by running games including a giant Connect-4, limbo competition and an XBox FIFA tournament.
Speakers at the launch included Emma Currivan as well as her deputy station manager Stephen Cahill, BCFE Principal Maureen Conway and Andy Clarke of 98FM and FRQ.fm. It was also attended by course tutors including Bernard Evans and Simon Maher, also of 8Radio.com.
Icon Radio will broadcast from Ballyfermot College’s high-tech studio which has a ‘green room’ for waiting guests, a separate news booth, and which uses the latest version of PSquared’s Myriad software as its playout system.
The station, which is likely to feature a number of future stars of the Irish radio industry, should be broadcasting a test signal over the coming weekend and hitting the airwaves proper on 107.8FM (receivable within a 4-5 mile radius of Ballyfermot) next Monday morning at 10am. They can also be found on facebook and twitter.
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